Requirements for higher speeds in communication networks and services continue to increase and such increase demands an increase in the bandwidths of optical communication systems. For example, applications for video, voice, high speed data and Internet continue to increase. Households use bandwidth for YouTube, SDTV, HDTV, personal video recordings, peer-to-peer video, high speed data and VoIP phones. By 2010 in the US, twenty such households are expected to have more traffic than the entire Internet in 1995. The existing 10 G networks operating at a data rate of 10 Gb/s are becoming inadequate in meeting these and other increasing traffic demands.
Therefore, there is a need for operating telecommunications equipment at data rates higher than the current data rate of 10 Gb/s, e.g., 40 G, 100 G and beyond.